Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business

A definitive audiobook for any CEO - first time or otherwise - of a high-growth company. While big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren't - and they're often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general.

The Six Secrets of Raising Capital: An Insider's Guide for Entrepreneurs

Based on Bill Fisher's three-day seminars that regularly sell out all over the world, this audiobook offers the kind of capital-raising street smarts no entrepreneur can do without. As a banker in Silicon Valley in the '80s and a businessman who founded a number of successful companies beginning in the '90s, Fisher has seen firsthand the kind of rookie mistakes aspiring entrepreneurs make that end up stopping them before they have a chance to get started.

Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors

Let's face it, as founders and entrepreneurs, you have a lot on your plate - getting to your minimum viable product, developing customer interaction, hiring team members, and managing the accounts/books. Sooner or later, you have a board of directors, three to five (or even seven) Type A personalities who seek your attention and at times will tell you what to do. While you might be hesitant to form a board, establishing an objective outside group is essential for startups.

The Art of Startup Fundraising takes a fresh look at raising money for startups, with a focus on the changing face of startup finance. New regulations are making the old go-to advice less relevant, as startup money is increasingly moving online. These new waters are all but uncharted - and founders need an accessible guide. This book helps you navigate the online world of startup fundraising with easy-to-follow explanations and expert perspective on the new digital world of finance.

Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money and Having Fun Investing in Startups

From building your reputation as a smart investor, to negotiating fair deals, adding value to your portfolio companies and helping them implement smart exit strategies, David provides both the fundamental strategies and the specific tools you need to take full advantage of this rapidly growing asset class.

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

It is a cold, hard fact of business life that most startups fail. Even many of those entrepreneurs who ultimately succeed have stories of personal challenges, unsuccessful companies, and difficulties along the way. The founders of TechStars, a mentorship-driven startup accelerator, have worked with entrepreneurs and companies over the past twenty-five years, and have seen a number of the same issues come up again and again.

The Founder's Dilemmas

Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin.

The Startup Checklist: 25 Steps to a Scalable, High-Growth Business

The Startup Checklist is the entrepreneur's essential companion. While most entrepreneurship books focus on strategy, this invaluable guide provides the concrete steps that will get your new business off to a strong start. You'll learn the ins and outs of startup execution, management, legal issues, and practical processes throughout the launch and growth phases and how to avoid the critical missteps that threaten the foundation of your business.

Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups - Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000

Over the past 25 years, Jason Calacanis has made a fortune investing in creators, spotting and helping build and fund a number of successful technology start-ups - investments that have earned him tens of millions of dollars. Now, in this enlightening guide that is sure to become the bible for 21st century investors, Calacanis takes potential angels step by step through his proven method of creating massive wealth: start-ups.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Ben Horowitz offers essential advice on building and running a startup - practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups

Twice a year in the heart of Silicon Valley, a small investment firm called Y Combinator selects an elite group of young entrepreneurs from around the world for three months of intense work and instruction. Their brand-new two- or three-person start-ups are given a seemingly impossible challenge: to turn a raw idea into a viable business, fast.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

#BreakInto VC: How to Break Into Venture Capital And Think Like an Investor

>#BreakIntoVC: How to Break Into Venture Capital And Think Like an Investor, gives you the insight to understand technology investing without endlessly scouring the Internet or having access to the top venture firms in the industry. What if a few new habits could help you understand the complex and ever-changing landscape of the technology sector? What if you could tell a great business from a good business with a few simple steps? Imagine being one of the smartest people in the room when it comes to transportation technology, drones, or healthcare technology.

The Start-Up J Curve: The Six Steps to Entrepreneurial Success

After founding or co-founding over 15 start-ups and investing in another 50 early stage ventures as an angel investor, author Howard Love came to understand that a start-up unfolds in a predictable pattern. The more aware entrepreneurs are of this pattern, the better able they will be to capitalize on it.

An accessible and practical toolkit that teams and companies in all industries can use to increase their customer base and market share, this book walks listeners through the process of creating and executing their own custom-made growth hacking strategy. It is a must listen for any marketer, entrepreneur, innovator or manager looking to replace wasteful big bets and "spaghetti-on-the-wall" approaches with more consistent, replicable, cost-effective, and data-driven results.

Slicing Pie: Funding Your Company without Funds

You and a partner go into business together and split the equity 50/50. You do all the work and your partner slacks off. He owns half your business - now what? Slicing Pie outlines a process for calculating exactly the right number of shares each founder or employee in an early stage company deserves.

You will learn: How to value the time and resources an individual brings to the company relative to the contributions of others.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

Most startups don't fail because they can't build a product. Most startups fail because they can't get traction. Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely. As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die.

Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price

A direct challenge to the status quo "spray and pray" style of innovation, Monetizing Innovation presents a practical approach that can be adopted by any organization, in any industry. Most monetizing innovation failure point home. Now more than ever, companies must rethink the practices that have lost countless billions of dollars. Monetizing Innovation presents a new way forward, and a clear promise: Go from hope to certainty.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Why do some products capture our attention, while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? This audiobook introduces listeners to the "Hook Model," a four steps process companies use to build customer habits. Through consecutive hook cycles, successful products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back repeatedly - without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging. Hooked is a guide to building products people can't put down.

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time

The ultimate guide to building an app-based business - now revised and updated. Apps have changed the way we communicate, shop, play, interact and travel, and their phenomenal popularity has presented possibly the biggest business opportunity in history. In How to Build a Billion Dollar App, serial tech entrepreneur George Berkowski gives you exclusive access to the secrets behind the success of the select group of apps that have achieved billion-dollar success.

The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

His work is cited by the world's best-known thought leaders, from Steve Jobs to Malcolm Gladwell. In this classic best seller - one of the most influential business books of all time - innovation expert Clayton Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right - yet still lose market leadership. Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation.

Facebook, PayPal, Alibaba, Uber - these seemingly disparate companies have upended entire industries by harnessing a single phenomenon: the platform business model. Platform Revolution delivers the first comprehensive analysis of how platforms use technology to match producers and consumers in a multisided marketplace, unlocking hidden resources and creating new forms of value. When a company like Uber connects drivers with passengers, everybody wins - except traditional cab companies, which are scrambling to survive.

Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal

When it comes to delivering a pitch, Oren Klaff has unparalleled credentials. Over the past 13 years, he has used his one-of-a-kind method to raise more than $400 million - and now, for the first time, he describes his formula to help you deliver a winning pitch in any business situation. Whether you’re selling ideas to investors, pitching a client for new business, or even negotiating for a higher salary, Pitch Anything will transform the way you position your ideas. According to Klaff, creating and presenting a great pitch isn’t an art - it’s a simple science.

Publisher's Summary

As each new generation of entrepreneurs emerges, there is a renewed interest in how venture capital deals come together. Yet there really is no definitive guide to venture capital deals. Nobody understands this better than authors Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. For more than seventeen years, they've been involved in hundreds of venture capital financings, and now, with Venture Deals, they share their experiences in this field with you.

Inspired by a series of blog posts - created by the authors after a particularly challenging deal - this reliable resource demystifies the venture capital financing process and helps you gain a practical perspective of this dynamic discipline.

Whether you're an experienced or aspiring entrepreneur, venture capitalist, or lawyer who partakes in these particular types of deals, you can benefit from the insights found throughout this book. Engaging and informative, Venture Deals skillfully outlines the essential elements of the venture capital term sheet - from terms related to economics to terms related to control. Feld and Mendelson strive to give a balanced view of the particular terms along with the strategies to getting to a fair deal. In addition to examining the nuts and bolts of the term sheet, Venture Deals also introduces you to the various participants in the process, discusses how fundraising works, reveals how VC firms operate, and describes how to apply different negotiating tactics to your deals. You'll also gain valuable insights into several common legal issues most startups face and, as a bonus, discover what a typical letter of intent to acquire your company looks like.

Venture Capital has a lot of tricky names and concepts, they explain them well and clearly

Any additional comments?

There could be a PDF file along with the book with all the examples and numbers cited... not always you can write them all down, and to follow the thinking it could be easier than to copy them in a paper and follow the audio

As a former author (of legal, tax, financial, and business issues), I was impressed with Brad and Jason's crystal-clear writing style.

There were so many things I found insightful. Here are a few of their recommendations: 1. Select the right lawyer. The lawyer you pick is a reflection of you. If you pick a "lame" lawyer (my word, not theirs), your own credibility drops more than a notch or two. 2. Keep tabs on (and control of) the negotiation with the VCs. Do not just hand over the reins to your attorney. The way to stay involved and in charge is to understand what is important in the negotiations and what is not. This way you can prevent each side's lawyers from quibbling over unimportant points which only serve to run up legal bills...and/or so you can prevent your attorney from straining your relationship with your investors. 3. Understand that the early rounds of financing can have a big effect on the future of your company (and they explain why, what you need to know, and what mistakes you should not make). 4. Understand the concept of ANTI-DILUTION. It's very important! 5. Understand FOUNDER VESTING. For example, if one of the founders decides to leave after a year or two, you do not want him or her to walk away with a large ownership stake, while you remain at the company and continue to work (hard).

Brad and Jason also teach you that not all VC firms are the same. Different firms specialize in different types of startups or in different stages of the funding process. And some firms are much better at mentoring entrepreneurs than others. The authors also discuss the TIMING of the funds run by VCs (most funds run approximately 10 years, and they explain why this is important for you to know).

They also help you to understand things from the perspective of VCs and angel investors, so you can present yourself well to them.

And all throughout, they teach you how avoid mistakes and nasty pitfalls that could result in serious and regrettable problems. In short, this book is exactly what every entrepreneur, VC, and advisor needs.

Thanks Brad and Jason. Your book is so well done, and written in such a wonderful, kind spirit. You have made an important contribution. I am tremendously impressed.

Though I enjoyed this audio version very much, I do believe that it is important to have this in a book or kindle form, too, so that you can refer to it as needed.

This book is packed with facts about the deal. If you've ever had a business, thought about investing in someone's business, its more than just equity at stake. The contracts Feld goes through in this book break it down line by line, explaining what is normal, vs when one person (the investor or entrepreneur) is getting the upper hand. Real life examples, candid opinions -- this is everything I wish lawyers, mentors, or teachers should have told me years ago but didn't. I imagine listening to this book once or twice a year to stay sharp.

The book provides a very useful summary to entrepreneurs and aspiring practitioners alike. The financial structure, the legal structure and documentation is well explained. If you are making your first contact with the world of venture capital I highly recommend this book.

For someone who has limited (no) experience with VC term sheets this was a useful outline of what one can expect, which will no doubt stop me looking like a complete fool when the time comes for a deal

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

Mr Richard Jelbert

Chichester, West Sussex Great Britain

3/22/17

Overall

"Excellent book for entrepreneurs!"

I found this book really helpful preparing for an up comming round of VC investment in my company. I thought I knew a lot already but I learned a great deal. The audio book version made it easy to dip in while driving.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Report Inappropriate Content

If you find this review inappropriate and think it should be removed from our site, let us know. This report will be reviewed by Audible and we will take appropriate action.